Why is carl sandburg called the voice of the people

One lively exception was the work of Carl Sandburg, who achieved a celebrity before his death in that seemed more typical of a Hollywood screen legend or a Hall of Fame athlete. Sandburg once wrote a poem to which, on television, Gene Kelly danced. The house in which he was born was preserved as a memorial to him when he was still alive.

But despite a diminished profile in the years since his passing, Sandburg continues to claim a place in American letters.

His poetry remains in print, along with a good bit of his prose. The house where he was born in Galesburg, Illinois, is a local shrine, and the North Carolina home where Sandburg spent the final years of his life is operated as a historic site by the National Park Service. The monument, if realized, may possibly be the first known instance of a man of letters memorialized alongside a head of livestock, but, then again, Sandburg had a flair for eccentricity and paradox.

He was a self-proclaimed socialist who achieved considerable wealth, a champion of Lincoln who took up residence in the former estate of a Confederate cabinet member, and an early advocate of urban realism who moved to the country and helped his wife raise champion goats.

Sandburg enjoyed unrivaled appeal as a poet in his day, perhaps because the breadth of his experiences connected him with so many strands of American life. Poet and performer, biographer and lecturer, salesman and singer, political activist and freewheeling newspaperman, Sandburg seemed to be everywhere and do everything, creating a personal narrative that captured the public imagination and made him a natural media figure.

The Chicago River underwent a straightening in to help the railroad yards and the street grid align. He was born on January 6, , the son of parents who had come from Sweden. He worked in a boathouse renting out rowboats at 25 cents an hour and selling refreshments. He worked for an ice company. He carried water, ran errands, and helped sponge and dry the sweating horses at the Williams racetrack. Along the way, in an odyssey that included a period as a hobo, Sandburg also harvested wheat and worked as a fruit picker, fireman, dishwasher, house painter, and milk wagon driver.

He served as an Army private in Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War, then tried to gain a slot at West Point, but was denied admission after faring poorly in math and grammar on the admissions test. But even though he seemed to be thriving as a college man, the restless Sandburg left Lombard before graduation, resuming a peripatetic life as a door-to-door salesman of stereoscopes, novelty devices that appeared to present pictures in three dimensions.

Douglas, director of the Henry M. The two married the following year, allowing Sandburg to gain not only a wife, but a prominent brother-in-law in Edward Steichen, a groundbreaking photographer who would become an important confidant and collaborator. After stints as a newspaperman and political aide in Milwaukee, Sandburg moved to Chicago, where he continued writing for various newspapers and journals while he refined his skills as a poet.

Like his reportage, the poems often read like prose with a topical flair. They crackle with the authenticity of everyday experience, the texture of daily life. His poems from this period often have the vividness and urgency of a morning headline.

I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years. But Sandburg, with an unflinching documentary eye, then depicts his adopted city as it is, not as its boosters wish it to be:. But, when it first appeared, Chicago Poems greeted many observers as a startling challenge to a tradition of American poetry that favored pastoral musings and idealized landscapes. Sandburg pointed to the cadence of everyday talk as a model for his poems, and he often favored free verse as a good way to convey the effect.

In citing ancient cultures as a rationale for his art, Sandburg acknowledged a wider world beyond America, an inclination that also drew him to Asian literature and philosophy.

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